David Grayson (entrepreneur)
David Grayson, CBE is Emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibiity at the Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University. From 2007-2017, he was director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility and held the Doughty chair of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield.
He has previously been a social entrepreneur - starting and / or running a number of public-private-community partnerships. He was co-founder / director of Project North East - now known as PNE Group - an innovative British NGO promoting enterprise and job creation which started in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England in 1980 and which has now worked in nearly 60 countries. (www.pne.org). He was the founder Principal of the BLU for small business development professionals established by the UK's Business Links and Small Business Service, modelled on corporate universities like the Unipart U.
He was a Managing-Director of Business in the Community (www.bitc.org.uk) and chairman of the UK Small Business Consortium. He was joint Managing-Director of the Prince's Youth Business Trust; and the director of The Prince of Wales Award for Innovation. He sat on the board of the UK's Strategic Rail Authority throughout its operational life, where he championed disability access. He was the first Chairman of the National Disability Council and a Patron of the disability charity Scope (www.scope.org.uk); and an ambassador for the National Aids Trust (www.nat.org.uk).
He has Master's degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Brussels (ULB, where he was a Wiener - Anspach Foundation Scholar) an MBA from Newcastle; and has an honorary doctorate of laws from London SouthBank University. He was the first German Marshall Fund Employment Fellow. He has been a Visiting Fellow at several UK business schools. He is a Fellow of the RSA and a member of the Faculty of the think-tank: Sustainability. He was a visiting senior fellow at the CSR Initiative of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, United States from 2005-2010.
He is chair of the board of the national charity Carers UK (www.CarersUK.org)
He was awarded the OBE for services to industry in 1994 and the CBE for services to disability in 1999. (www.davidgrayson.net)
Selected publications
Take Care: How to be a great employer for working carers (Emerald - 2017)
Social Intrapreneurism and all that Jazz (Greenleaf 2014) with Melody McLaren and Heiko Spitzeck
Corporate Responsibility Coalitions: The Past, Present and Future of Alliances for Sustainable Capitalism (Greenleaf 2013) with Jane Nelson
A New Mindset for Corporate Sustainability – with BT and Cisco and academics from MIT, IESE, Beijing and Singapore 2008 “Small is sustainable (and beautiful!) – encouraging European smaller enterprises to be sustainable” – David Grayson & Tom Dodd – Doughty Centre 2008 “Should companies do good things?” – Chris Marsden & David Grayson – Doughty Centre 2007
BUSINESS-LED CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY COALITIONS:Learning from the example of Business in the Community in the UK - An Insider’s Perspective - David Grayson – 2007 – CSR Initiative, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard "Corporate Social Opportunity: Seven Steps to make Corporate Social Responsibility work for your business" with Adrian Hodges - Greenleaf - 2004. "Everybody's Business - Managing Risks and Opportunities in to-day's global society" – with Adrian Hodges - Dorling Kindersley and The Financial Times 2001 Chapters in several other books including "The Accountable Corporation;" the Financial Times’s "Mastering Enterprise;" "The Financial Times Handbook of Management;" "The Directors' Manual;" and "What if?"